Through a significant development of human production activities in recent years, an enormous growth has been attained in scientific and technological fields as well as in the economic field; on the other hand, however, there is an increasing apprehension of environmental destruction in global scale caused by consumption of resources and energy for supporting these scientific and technological as well as economic activities. In the industrial fields, attempts at reducing the environmental damages caused by value-added products as much as possible are considered to become more and more active in the future.
Under these circumstances, a method has been proposed in which a LCA (life cycle assessment) for quantitatively assessing an environmental load of a product, i.e., load that affects the environment throughout a life cycle from extraction of the material, its manufacture, and a disposal thereof.
The proposed LCA, which has an advantage that environmental loads can be obtained quantitatively, is, however, associated with a problem that volume of data that must be obtained until the calculation of its environmental load are enormous, requiring complicated calculation for its assessment, thereby requiring a considerably large number of processes until a result thereof is obtained. Further, because a result of calculation is restricted within a given condition, there is a problem that the result of calculation may change greatly depending on a assumptions and/or variables to be considered.
Further, the data considered necessary for calculation of LCA extend to broad areas. For example, although a variety of numbers of parts (components) data are required for constituting one product, there is a problem that it takes lots of time and efforts to collect and manage the data. Still further, there is a problem that a process to search a desired data from an enormous volume of data related to these components may be very time-consuming and tedious.